Collocations for learners of Swedish

Collocations for learners of Swedish

Goal

Generate a list of collocations, phrasal verbs, set phrases and idioms important for learners of Swedish, linked to proficiency levels, for use in Lärka.

Background

The currently developed application Lärka, www.spraakbanken.gu.se/larka[4], is intended for computer-assisted language learning of L2 Swedish. Lärka generates a number of exercises based on corpora available through Korp, one of them focusing on vocabulary. It has been mentioned on several occasions that we should include multi-word expressions into our exercise generator. This also complies with the CEFR “can-do” statements at different levels of proficiency (http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_en.pdf[5]). It is, however, a non-trivial task to identify the items that should be included into the curriculum, and even more uncertain how the selected items can be assigned to different proficiency levels.

Problem description

The aims of this work are the following:

to study literature on collocations etc. in general and in the L2 context especially, paying special attention to the CEFR guidelines; to make an overview of the practices for training collocations etc. used in other applications and in (online) dictionaries/lexicons

to generate a list of collocations, (primarily) by automatic analysis of COCTAILL - a corpus of coursebook texts used for teaching Swedish. Study of different materials available outside COCTAILL, e.g. books written by Anna Hallström, multi-word expressions in Saldo and Lexin, may also prove to be beneficial, however, the challenge would be to define at which level these items should be introduced. To get some inspiration, have a look at English Vocabulary Profile: http://vocabulary.englishprofile.org/staticfiles/about.html[6] (user: englishprofile, password: vocabulary)

(potentially) to implement one or more of the suggested exercise formats as web services + user interface in Lärka